Library Before and After

For those that follow my book blog My Porch, these photos won't be new. I've modified a post I did back in January so I could feed the demand for some updates here at Lucy's Forever Home. John has promised me he is going to pull together some photos that no one has seen yet.

The row of grey Persephone books mark the end of the fiction. The two rows below that are various non-fiction books that have yet to be organized. I ran out of time.

Same fireplace when we first moved in and were thinking about a grey paint for the library.

After over a year of living with those color swatches on the wall, I decided just go ahead and paint the library even though it would be torn up in a year. It was also a good experiment in what turned out to be a color and color direction we really didn't want to go in the new library. The shelves to the right of the fireplace were not replaced. I gained some additional shelf space elsewhere in the library, but I will miss this odd bit. It's where I kept most of my TBR.

Looking the same general direction showing a bit more of the shelves. We ended up going with a much warmer grey with a little more brown and green in it.

All of the books had already been put on the shelves, but they weren't in any order. It took me most of a day to just get the fiction set right.

I haven't read any of the stories in these Everyman collections, but their covers have been too darn pretty to pass up. 

The end wall shelves are deeper and will house mainly art, gardening, and coffee table books.

Early in the process. I was still on the Bs.

Another 'before' picture for comparison. I'll admit this is looking pretty cozy.

One of the challenges I faced as I organized the fiction was whether or not to keep certain well-loved editions of books together or integrate them in alpha order with all of the other novels. In the end I kept the Persephones together but the NYRB and Viragos were split up.

This has nothing to do with the library but everything to do with cute.